The Alternative Career Path

Alternative career path (EDITED)

Fri, Jul 19, 2024 7:07AM • 30:12

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

travel, work, business, life, break, world, wanted, love, uts, paid, company, year, lovely, holiday, started, leisure, melbourne, stop, bit, managing

SPEAKERS

Emma Lovell

Emma Lovell 00:01

Do you want to live a life of freedom and adventure? Are you wanting more than the daily grind? Me too. Welcome to the Emma Lovell show, a place where we talk about living a life you love. Now, I'm your host, Emma Lovell, and my number one value is freedom. I've spent the last 14 years running a business and traveling the world. And now I take my husband and toddler along for the adventure to it's possible and I know you can create a life doing what you truly love as well. This podcast will inspire, motivate and encourage you to go after your dreams to create a life you love until you get now don't wait for a time and or someday in the future. I'll be sharing episodes weekly about how I harmonize business travel and self care. I'll also bring on incredible guests to share their journeys, wins the challenges and how they're creating a life they love. Let's jump in and get dreaming. This is a space for you to manifest a life you love. I would like to acknowledge and recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of this place now known as Australia. I am grateful for the continuing care of the land waterways and skies where I work live, listen, learn and play. From here on you can bear country and from wherever you are listening, I pay my respects to the elders past and present. Hello lovelies, and welcome to today's podcast, it's a bit of a different one. Today, I am getting ready to get my book out into the world. And it's actually available the art of pleasure for pre order right now. So you can head to my website, Emma lovell.au, forward slash book and grab yourself a copy pre order. It's coming all out on the 21st of August, but I'm fully immersed in book book prep world. And so I wanted to keep on that train and wanted to share with you actually, I did a speech earlier in the year on the alternative career path for my university UTS. So I went to the University of Technology, Sydney. And it was such an honor to be to be invited back by the UTS alumni, the young alumni organization to to speak for them. So I talked about the alternate career path that I've taken, how I do things differently and how I combine business and travel, which we now know is what I call bleisure. And so this I'm going to do a couple of episodes to share a little bit from that talk, because as well, basically I wrote for that speech 12,000 words, and it really kind of as I was writing it, it took me a lot to get it ready. And I think it's because I was pretty much writing the book as I was writing the speech. And yeah, it was a really interesting process. The wonderful Shelley Horton helped me with my intro for this speech and just preparing to do that. It really to do my keynote, and to do such an important keynote, which is really about my life journey to date, as well as my business journey and how I'm making this life work. So today, you're going to hear a bit about how I, what does bleisure look like for me, that's business travel and self care. And yeah, I don't want to give away too much. So I guess you better go and listen. But if you want the full story, the full, full full story, you better grab my book. I'm gonna continue to plug it. It's Emma lovell.au forward slash book. I hope you'll grab your copy today. All right, let's go. Have you ever had your world stop? Everything goes quiet. And the only sound you can hear is your own breathing and your voice. This happened to me. And the voice said, Please God, don't let this be it. I was at the snow competing in University Games for UTS at Thredbo ski resort. I hit a jump. I didn't clear it. I landed on the jump and I broke my tail 11 And l one vertebrae. I knew in that moment that my life had changed forever. I let out the most blood curdling primal scream. And ski patrol came and people rushed to my age. And then I stopped screaming. And I went quiet. Because I knew that that was a turning point in my life. I then spent eight days in the hospital 10 weeks in a back brace and I was told that if I did not rest and take this seriously, I could have serious health consequences for the rest of my life. But it was that time to rest and recover. That forced rest that gave me the time and space to think about what I want to do in my life. And I wanted, I wanted the freedom to do what I wanted to do to make the choices to have control over my life. And so I had thought that maybe at some point, I might like to start a business. And that rest and that pause, and that stop, gave me the opportunity to start. And on the first of September 2009, lovely communications was born. And now, I am a business travel life coach. I made that title up. It's my title. I am a coach, speaker and writer, and I help entrepreneurs who want to run sustainable and profitable businesses, travel the world and live a life that they love. Now. I'm here today to share with you how I've taken the alternate career path, and that you might look at me and go, Yeah, well, that's all well and good for her, but that you can to no matter what stage you're at, I've managed to combine my business to travel the entire trajectory of my business career, which is 14 and a half years. And I am living a life that I love. So not always easy. It's not always rosy and wonderful. And I would not stand up here and tell you that I am going to share the mistakes, the lessons and the ways that I've actually done it, I really want to get practical with you to make it possible for you. And just like my back, I do tend to do things in extremes. You don't have to do it that way. So today, we'll go through that. And I hope that I can inspire, encourage and motivate you just to think about some different ways, some alternate paths for you. And so we should go back in my journey a little bit, and we'll start where my entrepreneurial life began. So when I was 919 96, yes, nine. I've been an entrepreneur, my mom and dad are in the front row. They know, I wanted to hold a garage sale. So we held a garage sale, I had a massage business, which was just in my house with my mom and dad, I charged 20 cents and then increased the price to 50 cents. And Dad told me about the inflation and you know, but he's still paid. I earned $5. And I still remember the spreadsheet, I was very proud. And that was we also I would try and get involved in any business activities possible. So my parents that year, hosted a World Congress for the industry they worked in, and I went along and I stuffed bags, goodie bags for all the guests. And I just loved it. I was like, Yes, this is what I want to do. I started then working as soon as I could 14 Nine months in Australia, I ran around with my resumes. And my first job was at pretzel world. I can still rap a pretty good pretzel these days. And then I wanted to get back into the office stuff. So you know, left pretzel world and started working in office Jr. for a friend's company to get my Office experience, you know, 15 but during high school, I had a vision and I had a goal that I was going to do a gap here in 2006. So I fit graduated 2005 And I wanted to go on my gap year and travel the world. Nine was a very pivotal age for me. I planned that at nine years old, I would do that. So I wanted to work as much as I could. So during high school, I worked at dog kennels, we'd sometimes have up to 400 dogs over Christmas. I would work at ice cream place. I did some babysitting. I worked at Arizona, a Tex Mex restaurant. You don't know what that what that is. It wasn't the Shire. It was very famous at the time. But yeah, I worked on where to work. And I saved up my money. And I did my gap year, which was amazing. And we'll come back to that a little bit. But during that year, I was meant to be an au pair. I was meant to go to England and au pair for my cousin's. But on the way there I stopped in India, now my favourite country, and we met some friends that we'd met the year before. And I got offered a job in a freight forwarding company. And so I took that role. I then decided I wanted a bit more flexibility to try something different. Went through a recruitment company and ended up working at gum tree, which is now quite well known the marketplace Gumtree. It was a little baby company then that had just been acquired by eBay. So I got to work in the London office, eBay office, which was pretty cool. I then had the opportunity to stay. So this was early 2007. And I had to decide, am I coming back? Am I picking up this degree at UTS? Or do I just keep working and climbing the corporate ladder? But I had big visions and I thought I really want that business foundation and I want to come in at a higher level. So I came back to Australia 2007 started my degree here at UTS and I'm very excited to See one of my friends from my very first subject ever in the front row, which is a delight for ya. So then, you know, I had to keep working. So during uni, I did a couple of things, I started working in promotions. So people think of promotion think of promo models, like the grid girls, we would not premiere models we were sometimes we worked at music or concert, sometimes we're handing out flyers at bus stops. Sometimes we're handing out cheese at train stations, but it paid well, it was very flexible. So I did that a lot through university. I also worked here, and I don't know if it still exists, but the UTS union. So I worked there and actually started an event volunteer program for them, and got my speaking start by emceeing and speaking at lunchtime gigs. And we used to have these big concerts on the grass that was out there. And I would emcee those gigs and introduced bands at the time. And yeah, I was doing lots of work. One of the other jobs that I had that year was once I started my business degree, and I started to get some skills, I went back to being an office Jr, for the company that my dad was the CEO of. And then as I acquired more skills, I started marketing and PR subjects. And so I took on the role of marketing and PR. And as I learned more, I did more in the company. So that was another role. And then we come to 2009. And as I said before that I don't expect you to keep up with the dates in 2009, I broke my back, and everything stopped. And so then it actually gave me the time to think about what I wanted to do. And because of all this work and juggling all of this work, and I think you're starting to get the gist i i do like to work, I like to make money. And I'm willing to work. And I'm going to do it in a variety of ways. And so what I realized was that I had already to do the promotions work, I had to have an ABN Australian Business Number. And so I thought, Well, why don't I take that experience that I've been managing these clients and start my own business. And so I registered a business name. And I started the business. I went to my office job company My dad worked for and I said, Could I instead of being paid as an employee, invoice you as a client. And they said yes. And while I had a business and I had a client and kicked off from there, I will come back to that. But lovely communications was my company at the time. And up until last year, that was the name I changed the name last year and have gone in a slightly different direction. But it is the same business. It's been going since I've again, over the years, then I have done. I worked for a number of different clients, I would sometimes have eight clients at any one time. Starting out with PR services, then offering marketing, then social media became a thing you guys probably know that all along. But social media wasn't a job when I was there. When I started, it was called playing on Facebook. But I was quite good at it. And some companies, including a company in the travel sector recognized that I was quite good at blogging and quite good at socials. So they became my client and social media became a job that I did, but also that I would teach people how to do social media. I then progressed to doing more copywriting. And, again, I just worked with multiple clients. But some of those times I took on contracts. And so I would take on a full time contract. And one of those contracts with was with World Vision Australia, who's a charity. And it was incredible. It was like a bucket list thing to do PR and work in the media team for World Vision. And thanks to that role, and doing that full time contract, I was able to save up enough to buy an investment property. So I really thoroughly enjoyed my time there. But it was also such a great foundation within my work experience. I you know, didn't want to just start one business and I had in that meantime started a music PR promotion business with two other colleagues called TLC. We would promote comedians, musicians doing social media and public relations. We dissolve that business and you know, I thought why not start a third. And so I started lovely pet sitters, and we offered pet sitting services in Sydney, Melbourne Gold Coast and Brisbane. I would do the pet sitting myself but I also acted like an agency and had sitters all around. I hope you're keeping up with all these things. I'm going to do a test to the unknown. But in 2010, surprise, surprise, no, not 2010 We're up to 2019 2019 I had kind of had enough. I was a bit tired. Running a pet sitting business doing freelance writing, managing multiple subcontracts running my business. And I was actually in India and I was told Looking to a business coach on the phone, and I said, I've just had enough. And I decided to start working with that coach. And she helped me to recognize all of my skills over those 10 years, 10 years in business. And so we combine the PR, marketing, social media and copywriting. And I started to offer those services to personal brands. So individuals who wanted to build their brand and be recognized for that, which was incredible. So I stepped into the role of coach, and I got to work in a completely different way. I kept the freelance, I put the freelance travel writing, because I've had my blog, lovely travels ever since. And it's been the thing that's been consistent throughout my journey. And even up until recently, I've written articles for Virgin Australia. I've been republished in the Australian. And it's something that I can always pick up. And then last year, I decided, hey, after teaching people for four years about personal brand, maybe I should be a personal brand. So I rebranded myself, I've no, I don't say that. And I stepped into Emma Lovell. And so now my business is Emma Lovell, and I'm the Business Travel life coach. But one of the things that's also been consistent throughout my whole journey is travel. I do not live to work, I work to live. And travel is my guiding light, it's my passion. It's what I love. It's what gets me up in the morning. And it's something that I've done the entire time. And people say you've got the travel bug, I don't have a travel bug. Travel is part of me, it's part of my life. It's a it is has become part of my business. And I don't want it to be seen as something so separated. But my traveling started very young to at the age of two, I went on my first overseas trip, my parents English, and so we went back to visit the family. And by the time I was 18, I think I'd been to about eight countries. But you know, when people say due to who likes travel, like a little bit, or a lot. Yeah. You know, when I say I love, like, I like it a lot. I mean, a lot a lot. These are the countries that I visited. I have a vision and a mission to visit every un recognized country in the world. Does anyone know how many there are? Well done 193. And plus two special territories, I've been to both those special territories. I've always just been of attention trivia, they are Taiwan and the Vatican, if you will. So 72 countries 64. A UN recognize so I'm on the way, I'm gonna like almost a third of the way. But I just as I said, I really do love the travel, and I wanted to make it a part of my life. And I've been told you can't make money from travel, or you can't travel so much. Or now you finished your degree, you're gonna slow down the travel, now you have a child, you're gonna slow down to travel, now you've bought an investment property, you're going to slow down the travel. And that only adds fuel to my fire. I'm like, watch me. So yeah, please don't tell me not to go somewhere, because I will do it out of spite. Or I will just see it as a challenge and the gauntlet is laid. So I've set myself a pretty big mission here, I don't need a lot of encouragement to travel. So there's that. But I totally disagree with this, you can't make money from travel, because I've done it. And here are some of the ways that you can too. So there are many ways to travel and make money. And of course, I did a gap here where I went overseas and lived overseas and traveled. And that's great living in London traveling to Europe, it's fantastic. But not everybody has the time to go away for months at a time or to give up a year to travel around the sun. You know, sometimes you've got work or you've only got small windows. And it's possible to even to take your work and to travel as well. As I said for the entire there is no time. I would say maybe like 10 days, two weeks where I've ever like stopped working or maybe a three and a half week holiday I promised my husband that I would not work at all but when you're an entrepreneur, there's always ideas there's always things that you creating, there's always like networking. So there's here's some of the jobs and when you say I want to just highlight obviously I talked about the pet sitting so they've got Airbnb hosting there but also wanted to highlight that pet sitting and housing and I'll come back to that as well as a way to travel and to potentially make money or minimize your costs. Tour managing was a big one for me too. And that's where I called on experiences that I had so I would wasn't paid but I was paid for to travel so I've gone and done things like trek to Everest base camp cycle Cambodia cycle bed I'm trek to Machu Picchu tracked in Bhutan climbed Kilimanjaro, the largest freestanding mount in the world. Many of those were as a tour manager. And so a trip that should have cost me five to $10,000 didn't cost me any money, because I was using my experience. And so I didn't earn money, but I didn't spend money. I have also then gone on to take some of those experiences, and then write about them as a travel ride. So I've found ways to do that. But quite simply, I just work from anywhere. I take my laptop, my phone, they are my office, I tell you, I literally planes, trains, buses, hotels, friends, houses, my house, even the pool, I was on the phone to someone the other day, and she said I can hear splashing, is it your feet in the water? And I said, No, no, I'm in the pool. Like, yeah, I've got photos i Why not I not all of our work is spreadsheets and typing and things like that. We all have different nature of work. A colleague and I joke that you can only we will only take meetings in soak bath house from now on. So it's probably not always appropriate. So sometimes a cheese cake shop, but we can do business anywhere, and certainly overseas as well. And one of my newest ways that I do this is through retreat hosting. But as I said I was let's skip to that I I've told you a lot. I've told you a lot of the travel I've done, I didn't give you the full runway of the travel because we'd be here for a long time. I'll tell you that tragic like timeline. And other time. I've told you a lot of the work that I've done over the years to get me to here. And I said I got a bit tired as well. But even in the first year of running my business, I was trying to do a lot. I was running my business, lovely communications, I took on a director role for a company called Pogo Joe, which they used to sell University assignments. That was fun. And I was doing the promotions work. And that year, I was really trying to recoup from having broken my back the year before. I also had a personal loan. So I needed to try and get that paid back. And of course, I had another trip booked. So I had to pay for that. And so I was like okay, well, I'll just work more than I'll work more and more. And I'll work harder and harder. I'll make the money and then I'll go away, I'll work work work, and then I'll go and play. But if I didn't learn that lesson, from breaking my back, I decided I would break my mind. And so one day I was driving to work. And I thought, I'm going to crash my car. And it wasn't like a whoopsie if I don't pay attention, I might crash my car. It was if I do not stop the car, I'm going to drive into a wall. Because I was so broken. I was so exhausted. I was so over it that the only way I thought I can take a break is if I crashed the car. Now, I managed to drive to a side road, stop the car before proceeding into a full blown panic attack. The first and thankfully the worst of my life. I called my mum and asked her to call into work for me and tell them I wouldn't make it. And then when I compose myself enough, I went back to my aunt's place, fell into her arms. And then I didn't work for six to eight weeks. I was so done. And if you ask me what I break my back or break my mind, again, I will take the broken back every time. It was crippling. And so I want to say to you take a break. You do not have to physically or mentally or emotionally break in order to take a break in order to rest in order to recover. Take a break. I have had a few times over the past few years where I've thought oh, you know, like if I could just I don't know. Like when I broke my back. Like what if I could just injure myself a little bit like a little bit not life changing, but just enough that I'd have to go to hospital for a little rest, you know? Or, you know, wasn't it good when I had five days in hospital after having my son by elective cesarean where they did major abdominal surgery. You know, and then I couldn't pick up anything bigger than him like I had to take it easy for 12 weeks, like maybe just a bit like that. completely forgetting the extreme pain and the recovery and the damage it took on my and the toll it took on my body. But obviously in that time I'm so rundown, broken burnt out that that seems like a good idea. Thankfully, I'd haven't done those things. I don't do those things and I don't recommend those things. But it has taught me and I have have adopted the love of self care and the importance of self care. Do I do? So self care? Does anyone know what self care means? No, okay. Self care means taking care of yourself. And often self care is thought of as like getting your nails done, and obviously quite partial to that. But you know, or spa weekend or a holiday or like, you know, I'm sure all of you have done it, where you've worked, worked worked, you've gone on holiday, on holiday, but it takes you three to four days to one down, you finally start to enjoy your holiday, you're a bit relaxed, and then you come back, and then you do it all again. And within a two days, all of that lovely holiday bonus is gone. Because you just save up and use work, work, work, work, work, and then I'll get my holiday Work, Work work and I get my holiday. I'm like, why don't we just take a holiday all the time, or a lot of the time, like you could do it, I didn't move to the Gold Coast, you can have holidays all the time. But it doesn't have to be that big. Like sometimes self care can simply be getting enough sleep, like start with the basics. And I had had I've had an experience with mental illness, I had depression and anxiety young age. And the lesson from that. And the lesson from breaking back in the lesson from breaking my mind was that you can just do the simple things. And that's where you have to start getting enough sleep, eating nourishing food, getting some sun, finding what you love. And obviously I love travel. So again, I do take it to the extreme. And I said to a colleague recently, getting to bed on time can be really challenging. But tell me to go to India, and I'll jump on a plane and do it tomorrow. And that's my self care. But we can't always do that. So getting in the water going in the sun, or going for a walk, just find the things that you love reading a book actually getting to sit down and read a book, those things will top up your tank and can support you. But as I said, I've really embraced this self care. And I've also created this role of business travel life coach and I have discovered the art of leisure. Have you heard of bleisure? Before? This bleisure is business plus leisure, leisure, it is the art and I would say I'm quite the artist adage of combining work and leisure. It's not separating the two it's not work, work work. And then I'll take a break. It's finding ways to include leisure in your work. So it might even be that you travel for work. So you go away, you go to a conference for three days, but I see it so often people just get up in the morning, eight o'clock the next morning and leave straight from the conference when it's actually on a Saturday. And you've got this beautiful resort, which you probably haven't enjoyed, because you've been doing the whole conference thing. And you come straight back to live. When if you had to thought ahead a little bit, you could have paid maybe like three or $400 Extra. And don't worry, I'm gonna teach you how to make more money too. You could have made three or four, like a little bit more money, you've already paid the flights, you're already there. Why not just take two more days for yourself. You've done the business, you can do the leisure. Pleasure. And actually, there's a lovely lady here tonight who asked me when is my next holiday? And she said not a retreat a holiday and I was like, but the retreat is the whole like it's my business. But I was like okay, I'll answer the question. So in May, I'm running a retreat for two days at a fabulous hotel in Melbourne. So that's work, that's the business. And then my son and my husband are flying down to stay with me at the hotel, and then we're gonna have four days in Melbourne. So that's business and leisure. So it is a holiday. But I do a bit of work first, which I also thoroughly enjoy. I'm staying in the W in Melbourne. No, I don't think it'll be terrible. I really look forward to it. So it's, it's finding a way to combine it. And look, my dad did it well, too. He used to after we finish high school would go to these conferences in places like India, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, to stop over in Borneo. And you'd be there for three or four days. And then you've not taken leave, because work paid for your time to be there. So why not take the weekend, maybe two extra days, you've only taken two days of leave, you've been away 10 days, and you get to actually enjoy the culture. And we did that together. I know because I was right there working on those conferences as well. So finding ways that you can include holiday or leisure. You know, it's not separating, I always say I don't I don't have holidays. I call it travel, traveling. I'm enjoying. It's just my life. And so bleisure has become my life. Thank you for listening lovely one. I hope this has inspired you to dream big and start creating a life you love today. If you love what you're hearing, don't forget to follow and rate on Spotify and rate review and subscribe on iTunes. It helps other awesome people to find this podcast and get motivated and inspired as well. Want to stay connected. Come and join the live a life you love group on Facebook or connect with me on Instagram. Emma lovell.au The same as my website. But all the details are in The Show Notes lovely I'll see you next episode for more inspiration motivation and freedom seeking go out there and live a life you love